On May Day, join the Freedom Cities Movement as we carry on
the legacy of the Immigrant Worker Justice Tour in our struggle for freedom and
liberation!

Freedom Cities is about making entire cities, towns, and
communities safe for immigrants, Black people, Muslims, Queer+Trans folks,
workers, and all oppressed communities. Our liberation is inherently tied together,
it's all of us or none of us!

We all deserve to live with dignity and have the opportunity
thrive without fear of physical or economic violence at the hands of the
corporations, vigilantes or government.

Sunday, April 29, 2018

The Department of Homeland Security has now made it clear
that its policy really is to separate
parents from their children when they enter the U.S. to seek asylum. The
policy will be implemented by prosecuting the parents if they attempt to cross
the border anywhere except at a legal port of entry. This comes as a caravan of
asylum seekers, mostly from Central America, prepare to cross the border into
California today. The Trump administration has hyped the planned entry—by some
100 people, mostly women and children—as some sort of foreign invasion.

The plan to prosecute people for illegal entry, a
misdemeanor, comes right after Huffington Post’s Roque Planas published
an article about the way these prosecutions take resources away from the
prosecution of far more serious federal crimes. The crimes that will get less
attention include bank fraud, gun smuggling, money laundering—crimes that
benefit people like bankers, arms manufacturers, and real
estate mogulswho sell to money launderers…. –TPOI editor

The invading caravan in Tijuana. Photo: Ariana Drehsler/BuzzFeed News

Top Homeland Security officials urge criminal prosecution of
parents crossing border with children

By Maria Sacchetti, Washington Post

April 26, 2018

The nation’s top immigration and border officials are urging
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to detain and prosecute all
parents caught crossing the Mexican border illegally with their children, a
stark change in policy that would result in the separation of families that
until now have mostly been kept together.

If approved, the zero-tolerance measure could split up
thousands of families, although officials say they would not prosecute those
who turn themselves in at legal ports of entry and claim asylum. More than
20,000 of the 30,000 migrants who sought asylum during the first quarter — the
period from October-December — of the current fiscal year crossed the border
illegally.[…]

At the U.S. border, a diminished migrant caravan readies
for an unwelcoming reception

By Nick Miroff, Washington Post

April 27, 2018

TIJUANA, Mexico — The American president, a former real
estate mogul, does not want Byron Garcia in the United States. But the Honduran
teenager was too busy building his own hotel empire this week to worry much
about that.

Vermont Avenue and Connecticut Avenue were his. Now he was
looking to move up-market.[…]

When Tim Purdon became U.S. attorney for North Dakota in
2010, he had a priority: improving public safety on the state’s four Indian
reservations. Prosecuting violent crimes on Indian reservations falls to the
Justice Department, and Purdon himself had worked similar cases as a public
defender before taking on the U.S. attorney job.

But when Purdon took office, he found that more than a third
of his criminal caseload consisted of immigration prosecutions, even though
North Dakota lies more than 1,000 miles from the border with Mexico. Despite
the state’s proximity to Canada, the defendants were by and large Latin
Americans who’d been caught in the U.S. after getting deported. The cases were
easy to win. All prosecutors needed was to present paperwork proving the prior
deportation. But the cases sapped time away from Purdon’s prosecutors, whom
he’d have rather tasked with crimes on the reservations or white-collar
cases.[…]

Friday, April 27, 2018

Border Patrol agent found not guilty of murder in Mexican
teen's 2012 death

Almost six years after José Antonio Elena Rodríguez died
in a cross-border shooting, activists condemn US jury’s ‘inconceivable’ finding

By Rory Carroll, The Guardian

April 24, 2018

José Antonio Elena Rodríguez was on Calle Internacional,
four blocks from his home in Nogales, when 16 shots punctured the night. Ten
bullets struck him: eight in the back, two in the head. He died where he fell.

The 16-year-old was not a victim of street crime. All the
shots came from the United States, from the gun of a Border Patrol agent aiming
through the fence which separates Arizona from Mexico.[...]

How the Border Patrol Faked Statistics Showing a 73 Percent
Rise in Assaults Against Agents

By Debbie Nathan, The Intercept

April 23, 2018

LAST NOVEMBER, REPORTS that a pair of U.S. Border Patrol
agents had been attacked with rocks at a desolate spot in West Texas made news
around the country. The agents were found injured and unconscious at the bottom
of a culvert off Interstate 10. Agent Rogelio Martinez soon died from his
injuries. Early reports in right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart suggested
that the perpetrators were undocumented immigrants, and President Donald Trump
quickly embraced the narrative to bolster his campaign for a border wall.

To people familiar with the harsh terrain and the habits of
undocumented border crossers, however, the news made little sense. Why would
immigrants seeking entry to the U.S. hang out in the middle of nowhere, miles
from the border, waiting to randomly attack law enforcement officers?[…]

Cato published my recent Immigration Research and Policy
Brief that relied on Texas state criminal data to compare the conviction rates
of native-born Americans, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants. That Texas
state data was of such high quality that I was even able to compare conviction
rates by the type of crime. The result was that in 2015 the criminal conviction
and arrest rates for illegal immigrants were below that of native-born
Americans for virtually all crimes including homicide, sexual assault, and
larceny. This is just further evidence that illegal immigrants are less
crime-prone than native-born Americans.[…]

The top 10 offense categories where Secure Communities
removals grew the fastest since President Trump assumed office were generally
misdemeanors or petty offenses.

By Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC)

April 25, 2018

Immediately upon assuming office, President Trump issued an
Executive Order terminating what was known as the Priority Enforcement Program
(PEP) and "reinstat[ing] the immigration [enforcement] program known as
'Secure Communities.'" This program is widely portrayed as the cornerstone
of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts for stepped up deportations.

Recently released ICE removal-by-removal records from Secure
Communities—current through October 2017—provide a portrait of deportations of
immigrants from each state and county in the nation by the Trump
Administration. This report examines first how the level of Secure Communities
deportations has changed under the new administration, and then turns to what
types of crimes are now being targeted through this program.[…]

April 5th began in the usual way at the Southeastern Provision
meat-processing plant, in Bean Station, Tennessee—some workers were breaking
down carcasses on the production line, while others cleaned the floors—until,
around 9 a.m., a helicopter began circling above the plant. Moments later, a
fleet of cars pulled up outside. Agents from the I.R.S., Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ice), and the Tennessee Highway Patrol emerged, and
proceeded to arrest ninety-seven people, most of them originally from Mexico or
Guatemala, for working without legal papers. It was the largest workplace
roundup of immigrants in a decade.[…]

An ICE Raid Has Turned The Lives of Hundreds of Tennessee
Kids Upside Down

By Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker

April 24, 2018

In the spring of 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
arrested three hundred and eighty-nine workers, most of them Guatemalan, at a
kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. The headines at
the time focussed on the fate of those who’d been arrested, but the
consequences of the raid went much further. For months afterward, parents and
teachers in and around Postville reported that their children had trouble
focussing at school. The kids studied less, and acted out more. Their performance
in class generally declined. “Young kids are developmentally sensitive to
stresses involving family separation, and large-scale raids are an extreme form
of that stress,” Nicole Novak, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa,
told me. Novak led a study that examined the birth certificates of children
born in Iowa in the year after the raid: among the babies born to Hispanic
mothers, there had been a spike in the number who were born abnormally small, a
mark of maternal duress during pregnancy.[…]

Thursday, April 26, 2018

On April 24 DC District Court John D. Bates issued a
complicated decision on DACA which many people seem to misunderstand. The short
version is that the judge ordered a complete reinstatement of DACA unless the
Trump administration comes up with a better reason for ending it. The
government has 90 days to improve its original claims, and of course a higher court could overrule Bates. So
the decision definitely doesn’t mean DACA recipients are safe.

DACA supporters march in San Francisco. Photo: David Bacon

Bates objected to errors in the grounds Jeff Sessions gave last September for rescinding DACA (see DACA Update #2 for other issues with Sessions on DACA). Basically Sessions' problem was that
the DACA termination was going to be unpopular, so he wanted to find
statutory and constitutional objections to the program instead of admitting the administration just didn't want it. But he botched the job.

Presumably the administration could use the 90 days to find a competent lawyer who could construct a
better case for ending DACA.

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Officials presented Mr. Trump with a list of proposals,
including the plan to routinely separate immigrant adults from their children.
The president urged Ms. Nielsen to move forward with the policies, the person
said.

Photo: Jennifer Whitney/NY Times

By Caitlin Dickerson, New York Times

April 20, 2018

On Feb. 20, a young woman named Mirian arrived at the Texas
border carrying her 18-month-old son. They had fled their home in Honduras
through a cloud of tear gas, she told border agents, and needed protection from
the political violence there.

She had hoped she and her son would find refuge together.
Instead, the agents ordered her to place her son in the back seat of a
government vehicle, she said later in a sworn declaration to a federal court.
They both cried as the boy was driven away.[…]

Monday, April 16, 2018

Trump calls for militarizing the border—how should we answer
him? School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch)
and local organizations are sponsoring two events in New York City this week
about ways to build solidarity with Mexican and Central American migrants and
activists.

Eduardo Garcia, a national organizer of the School of the Americas Watch, will discuss the
transnational solidarity being built around the Observatorio de
Derechos Humanos de los Pueblos in Oaxaca, which is an initiative of more
than 100 organizations grassroots and popular organizations in Latin America
and the Caribbean that seeks to monitor, document, disseminate, promote and
demand the exercise of Peoples' Human Rights, Democracy and Social Justice from
a perspective of construction and deepening of resistance, rebellion, memory
and popular power.

Eduardo will show about 10 minutes of his documentary
project, being co-produced with Samantha Demby, about the People’s Observatory
and its caravan to the 2017 Border Encuentro in Nogales Sonora-Arizona,
highlighting the importance of indigenous and women’s leadership in Observatory
and its national and international solidarity actions. He will also talk about
a delegation of observers for the upcoming Mexican elections, being
co-organized by SOAW and the Observatorio, and how to be a part of it.

The People's Human Rights Observatory is an initiative of
grassroots and popular organizations in Latin America, the Caribbean and
Palestine that seeks to monitor, document, disseminate, promote and demand the
protection of Latin American communities Human Rights, Democracy and Social
Justice from a perspective of constructing and deepening of resistance,
rebellion, memory and popular power. This is an effort of more than 100
organizations, with representation from indigenous leaders, Nobel Peace Prize
recipients, feminist groups, agrarian movements, academics and journalists. SOA
Watch’s presence in the Observatory is the materialization of active solidarity
with Latin American movements and an example of resistance against the
oppressive systems perpetuated by the US imperialism. This collective effort is
an example of the dignity that unites free peoples protecting their historic
memory and autonomy.

With Eduardo ‘Lalo' García, Organizer with School of the
Americas Watch (SOA Watch), speaking against border militarization and for
cross border solidarity

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Update 4/26/18: At an April 25 congressional hearing, Jeff Sessions announced that he had changed his mind and wouldn't suspend the Legal Orientation Program, at least for now.

In a major
raid on April 5, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained
97 employees at a family-owned meat-processing plant in Bean Station,
Tennessee. The detentions devastated the rural area’s immigrant community.
Local sources reported that some600
children failed to attend school the next day, and churches were providing
shelter for dozens of minors left without caregivers. More than 1,000
people gathered at a local elementary school on April 8 to show support for
the detainees’ families. This was reportedly the largest workplace raid since
the administration of George W. Bush, which carried out a number of massive
raids, culminating in the May
2008 detention of 389 workers at a meat-processing plant in Postville, Iowa

The dramatic raid in Tennessee was hardly more than a blip
in most national media. Immigration coverage that week had been overwhelmed by
a burst of incoherent
and fact-free rants from Donald Trump about borders and what he called
“ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release.” But the raid is
an important example of the extent to which the Trump administration has
already been able to implement a hard-line anti-immigrant agenda without the need
for Congressional approval—and without attracting a lot of attention from the
media or the groups that focus on lobbying and electoral politics.

Making Bad Courts Worse

One area where the administration has concentrated its efforts is
the immigration court system.

Despite the name, these courts aren’t part of the U.S.
judiciary system; they’re administrative courts operated by the Department of
Justice. In other words, an immigration judge is employed by the same executive
branch which comes to the court seeking an immigrant’s deportation. This
essential unfairness has been detailed neatly by TV satirist John Oliver. But now
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is working to make the system even worse.

The immigration courts suffer from a massive backlog of more
than 650,000 cases, one aggravatedby the administration’s decision to step up detentions and
deportations. Congress has provided funds to hire 100 additional immigration
judges to help with the backlog, but this isn’t enough for Sessions. In a memo
sent out at the end of March, the attorney general set a quota for immigration
judges: starting in October each judge is expected to clear 700
cases a year. What this will produce is “an assembly line, not a judicial
system,” according to a Los Angeles Times editorial, with “the
very real risk of subverting due process rights as individual judges place
their job security ahead of justice.”

Jeff Sessions. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Since the cases brought before immigration courts are civil,
not criminal, the government isn’t required to provide the immigrant defendants
with lawyers. Since 2003 the Justice Department has sponsored a program (the Legal
Orientation Program, LOP) which gives
some relief by offering legal advice to about 50,000 immigrants each years.
A 2012 Justice Department study found that the LOP actually saves the government money and
helps reduce the courts’ backlog, but as of April 10 the department had suspended the program, ostensibly in order to audit its cost-effectiveness.
“This is a blatant attempt by the administration to strip detained immigrants
of even the pretense of due-process rights,” Mary Meg McCarthy, executive
director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, told the Washington Post.

Sessions is also working to reduce the independence of the
immigration court system’s appellate unit, the Board of Immigration Appeals
(BIA). The attorney general has the authority to rule on cases and even to
overturn BIA decisions, but Sessions’ predecessors used the powers
sparingly. In contrast, the current AG has taken over three cases this year alone and has already decided one in a way
that threatens the due process rights of asylum seekers. Stephen Legomsky, a
former lead counsel for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, calls the
attorney general substituting his decisions for those of the BIA “analogous to
a prosecutor in a criminal case deciding the case.”

Republican “Family
Values”

The executive branch also has a great deal of leeway in how
it handles the detention and deportation of immigrants it targets. There have
been many abuses of this power in the past, but the present administration
seems on track to set a record.

On April 10 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed
a class action suit in federal court in Boston challenging what it charged
was a pattern of the government detaining immigrants as they were applying
to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to gain legal
status as spouses of U.S. citizens. The suit cites seven cases in January alone
of immigrants arrested while they were visiting USCIS offices in Massachusetts
or Rhode Island while engaged in the application process.

The government can be equally harsh in the way it treats
immigrants once they are detained. Before last December, immigration
authorities released most pregnant immigrants while their cases were pending.
The Trump administration ended the policy in December, and 506
pregnant women were placed in detention during the first three months of
this year. Meanwhile, advocates say the Border Patrol has instituted a policy
of separating
the families of asylum seekers, leaving even very small children in
isolation from their parents.

The Department of Homeland Security denies
that there is a policy “that encourages the separation of parents from their
children as a punitive or deterrence measure,” but advocates say there are “hundreds
of cases.” This is from an administration led by a political party claiming
that “family is
the bedrock of our nation.”

“Thank You for Your Service”

But Trump’s immigration apparatus follows policies still
more incompatible with his party’s supposed values. Sometimes it’s hard to see
any motive for the government’s actions other than an eagerness to meet arrest
quotas—or maybe just nastiness on the part of empowered bureaucrats.

The president claims to want “merit-based”
immigration, but his immigration agents seem to have no problem targeting
well-educated professionals who are already living here. In early April ICE
seized a New Jersey physics teacher named Ahmed
Abdelbasit and threw him into detention. If deported, Abdelbasit would face
a death sentence in his native Egypt resulting from political activism. Earlier
in the year ICE agents detained Syed
Jamal, a chemistry teacher in Kansas, and an Illinois doctor, Lukasz
Niec. Both are longtime residents with U.S. citizen children.

Deported veteran Miguel Perez

Republicans routinely call for “supporting our troops,” but
this apparently doesn’t include Miguel
Perez, a Mexican-born green card recipient, who served two tours in
Afghanistan. Diagnosed
with PTSD after his return, Perez fell into drug abuse, was convicted for
an attempted cocaine sale, and served half of a 15-year sentence. The Obama
administration began deportation proceedings against Perez in 2016, but the
Trump administration finished the job—despite pleas from supporters, including
Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). The veteran was deported to Mexico on March 24 with little more than the clothes on his back.

And what about the president’s claim to be protecting U.S.
citizens from the MS-13 gang? In 2015 a Salvadoran youth on Long Island decided
to quit the gang and help the authorities arrest other members. We might expect the U.S. government to shield the
teenager, possibly putting him in the witness protection program in order to
encourage future cooperation from others. Instead, immigration authorities
placed him in detention and are now attempting to deport him to El Salvador,
where he feels sure he’ll be murdered as an informant.

Such practices have of course met a great deal of
criticism. Last year White House chief of staff John Kelly, then the DHS head,
had an answer for critics in Congress: “If lawmakers do not like the laws
they’ve passed and we are charged to enforce, then they should have the courage
and skill to change the laws,” he said. “Otherwise, they should shut up and
support the men and women on the front lines.”

Monday, April 9, 2018

An April 5 Los Angeles Times opinion piece explains
some of the avenues for large-scale, coordinated grassroots
resistance to Trump’s immigration agenda. In “The case for non-governmental sanctuary for immigrants,” law professors Rose Cuison Villazor
and Pratheepan Gulasekaram note the “bold steps” that “many
institutions of everyday life — churches, schools, employers, businesses and
nonprofits of every stripe — are taking…to protect undocumented immigrants.”

In a draft article last revised on April 4, law professor
Bill Ong Hing, the author of Defining America
Through Immigration, notes that many major corporations have
denounced the Trump government’s rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals (DACA). Could they follow through on their denunciations by continuing
to employ DACA recipients after their work permits expire? Professor Hing considers the legal and moral
implications of civil disobedience by employers.—TPOI Editor

The Trump administration
intensified its fight with California last month when the Department of Justice
filed a lawsuit arguing that the state's so-called sanctuary laws undermine
federal immigration enforcement and are therefore unconstitutional. A few
cities and counties in California have also opposed the policies in recent
weeks. Despite all the bluster, California is likely to prevail.
The Supreme Court's governing interpretation of the 10th Amendment protects the
autonomy of states and prevents them from being conscripted into federal
enforcement programs.

Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, a new development could
undercut the DOJ's anti-sanctuary campaign. Across California and the country,
many institutions of everyday life — churches, schools, employers, businesses
and nonprofits of every stripe — are taking bold steps to protect undocumented
immigrants.[…]

The fact that DACA recipients — and essentially all Dreamers
— have become part of the conscience of the country and a critical part of the
economy is illustrated by the strong support for them exhibited by major
businesses in the United States. Dozens of CEOs from companies like Microsoft,
Amazon, Netflix, AT&T, Wells Fargo, Google, and Facebook urged the
president to preserve the program. After the Trump Administration announced the
rescission of the DACA program on September 5, 2017, even more companies
denounced the action and called on Congress to pass the Dream Act before the
DACA termination date of March 5, 2018.

Although the statements of support for DACA recipients and
Dreamers, and calls for passage of the Dream Act are important, are employers
willing to do more?[…]

Friday, April 6, 2018

In November 2009 Monthly Review’s blog carried an articleby Politics of Immigration co-author David Wilson about the likely
impact of the June
2009 coup in Honduras on immigration from that country to the U.S.:

So far the military coup that removed Honduran
president José Manuel Zelaya Rosales from office on June 28 hasn’t produced any
noticeable increase in immigration from the Central American country — probably
because Honduran workers and campesinos are actively organizing against the
coup regime and so far have held it in check.
But the situation could change quickly if repression against these
grassroots movements increases. More
than a half million people fled to the United States from the region during the
1980s, when the U.S. government was funding rightwing forces during civil
conflicts in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. And people may remember the effects of a very similar coup in
Haiti in 1991: the repression that followed the overthrow of President Jean
Bertrand Aristide drove tens of thousands of Haitians to undertake the
dangerous sea journey to Florida in overloaded boats.

The article went on to discuss the anti-immigrant rants of
James DeMint, then a senator from South Carolina and a favorite of the
immigration restrictionist Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
DeMint was a strong supporter of the Honduran coup.

If the coup regime manages
to hold on to power, Wilson wrote, and refugees start fleeing their country for exile
in the United States, we can be sure Senator DeMint and FAIR will be among the
first to ask what part of “illegal” these Hondurans don’t understand.

DeMint has passed into relative obscurity, but his
co-thinkers now dictate the White House’s immigration policies. And Honduras' coup regime has held on, solidifying
its power last November with an electoral victory questioned by international
observers but backed
by the government of Donald Trump. This week the rightwing media learned from BuzzFeedthat hundreds of Hondurans were fleeing their country’s repressive government
in a caravan
passing through southern Mexico. Trump reacted with tweets and rants that even
the corporate media qualified as “unhinged.”
Now he’s moving to send National Guard forces to the border to stop what he incoherently
called a “journey coming up” in which he apparently thinks “women are
raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before.”

Just as predicted, unfortunately. The names have changed, but the hypocrisy hasn’t.

Monday, April 2, 2018

“The only way we can stop the
deportations now is to demonstrate, to commit mass civil disobedience, over and
over again. Sanctuary in churches must become militant mass sanctuary in the
streets.”

By David L. Wilson,
Truthout

April 2, 2018

Activism for immigrant
rights may be about to get much more militant.

Some
1.1 million undocumented people -- beneficiaries of Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or Temporary Protected Status (TPS) -- are slated to
lose their protection against deportation over the next two years, along with
the possibility of obtaining work permits or aid for higher education. The
result will of course be devastating for them and for their relatives, friends
and communities, but there will also be repercussions for the society as a
whole, especially in areas with large immigrant populations.[...]

About The Politics of Immigration

The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers is a book that goes beyond soundbites to tackle concerns about immigration in straightforward language and an accessible question-and-answer format. For immigrants and supporters, the book is a useful tool to confront stereotypes and disinformation. For those who are undecided about immigration, it lays out the facts and clear reasoning they need to develop an informed opinion. Ideal for classroom use, the updated and expanded 2017 edition provides a succinct overview of U.S. immigration history, policy, and practice, with detailed notes guiding readers toward further exploration.
Guskin and Wilson have written extensively on immigration and facilitated dozens of dialogues on the topic with students, community activists, congregations, and other public audiences. To arrange a dialogue or for more information, contact them at thepoliticsofimmigration@gmail.com.
To stay in the loop on author events and related resources, follow the book on Twitter (@Immigration_QA) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ImmigrationQA/).